And it goes beyond gaming: Developers are producing Rift-enabled tools to let users explore everything from molecules to galaxies.
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Software developers from Gears of War maker Epic Games to EVE Online studio CCP have been designing new experiences for the Rift. Luckey’s advances have inspired Sony to announce its own forthcoming VR hardware, for now known only as Project Morpheus. Oculus has almost single-handedly revived that dream. All for a company that doesn’t even have a commercial product yet and is chasing a dream that most of the tech community had seemingly given up on decades ago. And finally, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook.
Then another unit to the Game Developers Conference in March. Then it brought another, even more advanced one to CES this past January. A year later, Oculus brought an HD prototype to E3 and blew minds all over again.
In June 2012, John Carmack-the legendary founder of id Software, the company that created Doom, Quake, and the entire concept of 3-D gaming-brought that early prototype to the E3 videogame show, reintroducing VR to the popular conversation for the first time since The Lawnmower Man. This is going to be bigger than I ever expected.Īnd that’s saying something, because the expectations surrounding the Oculus Rift have always been huge, ever since an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey hacked together a rough prototype in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California, in 2011. Videogame legend John Carmack, seen here in 2009, would leave id Software to join Oculus as CTO. “How long was I in there?” he asked Abrash and Binstock. His head felt strange-not dizzy, not displaced, but overwhelmed.
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They ran through the entire series once more. “Again,” he said, scarcely able to believe what he was asking for. The Rift had made enough headway to excite long-suffering VR enthusiasts, but it was still a long way from where it needed to be.īut Iribe couldn’t take his headset off. There were a million little problems like that, tiny technical details that would need to be solved if virtual reality were ever to become more than a futurist’s fantasy. If you turn your head and the image on the screen that’s inches from your eyes doesn’t adjust instantaneously, your visual system conflicts with your vestibular system, and you get sick. But with virtual reality, it’s nauseating. In a traditional videogame, too much latency is annoying-you push a button and by the time your action registers onscreen you’re already dead. This was the problem with virtual reality. But it faced the same problem that had bedeviled would-be pioneers like eMagin, Vuzix, even Nintendo: It made people want to throw up. Oculus’ flagship product, the Rift, was widely seen as the most promising VR device in years, enveloping users in an all-encompassing simulacrum that felt like something out of Snow Crash or Star Trek.
That fall Oculus was still just an ambitious startup chasing virtual reality, a dream that had foiled countless entrepreneurs and technologists for two decades. Most of all, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook. The around-the-block lines at South by Southwest. The rhapsodic crowds at the Consumer Electronics Show. As he flew from Orange County to Seattle in September 2013, Brendan Iribe, the CEO of Oculus, couldn’t envision what the next six months would bring.
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